Content sharing services serve content, such as pictures, videos, text, or combinations thereof, to visitors who access the content sharing service. The content may be sourced from a publisher, automatically generated, or uploaded by one of the visitors to the content sharing service. The content may be represented as digitally encoded information. The content sharing service may store the content, or link to other services and subsequently retrieve the content prior to serving the content to the visitors.
The visitor may employ various techniques to access the content. For example, the visitor may access the content sharing service through a browser. In another example, the visitor may access the content sharing service via an application installed on a mobile device. The visitor may use any sort of device enabled to interact with the content sharing service, such as a personal computer, mobile phone, or an Internet enabled television, for example.
The content sharing service may serve shared content along with content. The shared content may be served before, during, or after the serving of the content. The shared content may be associated with meta information, and when the shared content is clicked-through by a visitor, the visitor may be redirected to additional content associated with the shared content. The shared content may provide information associated with a product or service related to the content.
The shared content may be sourced from an online shared content network. Thus, the shared content may be retrieved from the online shared content network any instance that content is retrieved from the content sharing service. Further, because the content may be served through a third-party service, such as a social network or a blog, the online shared content network may separately provide and source shared content. A third-party service may incorporate the serving of shared content absent the serving of content. In this way, the third-party service may share in any revenue generated from the serving of shared content with the online shared content network, or the content sharing service (which may or may not be partnered with the online shared content network).
The content sharing service may monetize serving the shared content. Specifically, the content sharing service may monetize whether the visitor clicked-through the shared content. Thus, shared content effective at enticing a viewer to click-through the shared content may be monetized at a higher amount than shared content that is ignored. Further, the shared content may be incorporated with a bypass function. In certain cases, the online shared content network may monetize the serving of shared content when the viewer does not enable the bypass function (or does not enable the bypass function after a predetermined time threshold).